Movie review: Western Hostiles’ shoots blanks

Tuesday

Jan 2, 2018 at 4:56 PMJan 2, 2018 at 4:56 PM

Al Alexander More Content Now

What are we to make of “Hostiles,” writer-director Scott Cooper’s existential Western that aims to take our nation’s genocide of Native Americans to task but ends up celebrating a Union captain who claimed “more scalps than Sitting Bull?” Does he even see the gross contradiction? It escapes it him at nearly every turn of a plodding journey that treats its cast of Native Americans as props more than people.

Led by Wes Studi, a gifted actor Hollywood has repeatedly failed since his stunning debut in “The Last of the Mohicans,” the five Natives Cooper has assembled are consistently pushed to the background to make room for yet another oversized performance by Christian Bale as the stereotypical great white hunter. It’s 1892 New Mexico, and his Capt. Joe Blocker is still referring to his feathered enemies as “savages,” and suggesting that the only good one is a dead one. So, who better to escort his most hated adversary, Studi’s cancer-stricken Chief Yellow Hawk, on the roughly 1,000-mile journey to the dying Cheyenne warrior’s Montana homeland? Blocker reacts to his latest orders by heading out to an open field, pointing a gun at his head and screaming at the top of his lungs. Funny, I had the exact same impulse when faced with the prospect of 135 minutes of enduring the thing I hate most: Movie clichés. Cooper fires them at you like flaming arrows, and they’re non-stop, beginning with the oldest one in the book: The veteran cop — or, in this case “Indian hunter” — being sent out on his last chore before retirement. Complete it, go home and rest on your pension, assuming you survive.

Abetting the captain in his “dangerous” march north is a rogue’s gallery of characters from central casting, beginning with the disheveled, drunken sergeant (“Dazed and Confused’s” Rory Cochrane) in search of redemption. He’s joined by the token black guy (Jonathan Majors) with a target on his back, the punk “kid” with the French accent (Timothée Chalamet, as comatose here as he is in “Call Me by Your Name”) and the fresh-faced West Point fancy pants (Jesse Plemons) who never fired a bullet at another human being.

As soon as they mount their lumbering horses with Yellow Hawk and four members of his family in tow, you instantly get the feeling that Cooper intends to take his sweet time telling a dull story of reflection and absolution. But first, we must make a slight detour to add a feminine touch in the person of Rosamund Pike’s grieving settler whose husband, two daughters and infant child were wiped out by a wilding gang of Comanche back at the beginning of the movie. Her purpose is twofold, one to remind us that unlike the genial Cheyenne — represented by the dignified Yellow Hawk — Comanches are real-bad dudes; and two, to give Bale a quasi-romantic interest.

Pike, so great as Ben Affleck’s conniving wife in “Gone Girl,” fails miserably on both counts, always presenting an air of being the third wheel in a man’s-man movie about surviving a full-on assault by rugged terrain, brutal elements and attacks by everyone from Comanches to redneck ranchers who don’t cotton to the people they stole their land from. But, by far, the most formidable foe — not counting Ben Foster’s ax murderer the party inexplicably picks up along the way — are the men’s consciences, as they futilely try to reconcile all the death and destruction they waged with all the death and destruction that was waged on them.

It’s the standard psychological makeup of every Western character since Clint Eastwood set the revisionist template with his Oscar-winning “Unforgiven.” Clearly, it’s Cooper’s intent to make “Hostiles” his “Unforgiven,” but what he’s wrought is closer to “Unforgiveable.” That’s not to say his movie doesn’t have its moments, like Pike’s character poignantly discovering that not all Native Americans are out to kill her, but there simply aren’t enough of them. And Bale doesn’t help things much by his insistence on mumbling his every line, and so measuredly walking the line between hero and villain that he never adds up to much of anything. But at least we get to know more about his Capt. Blocker than the five Native Americans combined.

Like the gear piled on the backs of the contingent’s pack horses, they’re mostly just luggage, mere prisoners in what should be their own movie. Cooper would like to let them speak and voice their opinions on what the white man has done to their people, but he’d rather let his guilt-ridden ego do all the talking for them. You ask yourself, “Why are they even here.” More urgently, what’s the point of it all? If it’s to frustrate and bore, Cooper more than succeeds. But if it’s to engage and enlighten, he’s rambling down the wrong warpath.